Nationalism comments roil Prop. 16 campaign
SACRAMENTO — The final days of a ballot measure campaign to overturn California’s ban on affirmative action have been turbocharged by comments about white nationalism made by Ward Connerly, the driving force behind the 1990s law.
Connerly, who is Black, was quoted this week as saying that white nationalists were “super patriots” and that he considered himself to be a “super patriot” as well. In an interview with The Chronicle, he denied sympathizing with white nationalism and said he was unfamiliar with the concept.
“I have had the question many times before about nationalism, white nationalism, and I’ve never understood why white has to be associated with nationalism,” Connerly said in an interview Thursday.
“My response has always been, as it is now, if you mean by nationalism, pride of country, patriotism, I’m a nationalist. I’m a super nationalist. Because I love my country, I love our ideals,” he said. “And I don’t see the need even to preface it even by, ‘ Are you a white nationalist? Are you a Black nationalist?’ Whatever it
is, I want you to be a patriot.”
Supporters of Proposition 16, an initiative that would restore the ability to consider race and sex in government hiring and contracting and publicuniversity admissions, said they were alarmed by an interview with Connerly published in the online education news site EdSource on Wednesday. In it, Connerly also predicted that the return of affirmative action would lead to white people abandoning California and praised President Trump for “not making a big issue of race.”
During a news conference, Michele Siqueiros, president of the higher education advocacy group the Campaign for College Opportunity, said critics had always known that the affirmative action ban “was a movement driven by racist, antiimmigrant and anticivil rights agendas.”
Connerly, then a businessman and University of California regent, was the face of the 1996 push to pass the ban, Proposition 209, which passed with 55% of the vote. Connerly, 81, moved to Idaho in his retirement, but returned to California this year to help lead the campaign against Prop. 16.
“People like Ward profess that race doesn’t matter and yet parrot white supremacy, calling them patriots, and seem obsessed with white flight from California,”
Siqueiros said.
Connerly said he could not remember the question that prompted his response about nationalism. But he said he had no idea there was a specific meaning for white nationalism, an ideology that espouses the supremacy of white people and seeks to create a separate society for them. White nationalist groups have become increasingly prominent in recent years, particularly following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“Hell, no, I don’t defend it. I don’t defend it whether it’s Louis Farrakhan or whether it’s David Duke,” Connerly said, referring to the head of the Black nationalist Nation of Islam ( Farrakhan) and the former leader of the white supremacist Ku
Klux Klan. “I don’t sanction or condone supremacy of any group.”
Connerly said “race is something that we should try to purge out of our public life,” because it is used to divide the country.
“My view is, yes, we are people of the world and we will extend an open hand to people of the world, but we’ve got to deal with our own problems here in America,” he said. “Therefore I’m a nationalist. I’m a brownskinned nationalist.”